1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of financial resource management, inventory control and online purchasing between customers, retailers, suppliers and wholesalers. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system of computers linked to form a Supercomputer subdivided into multiple hierarchical neural sub-components having neural elements residing at remote sites. The Supercomputer updates, validates and verifies the flow of environmental messages, allowing the end users to find the lowest FOB, C&F, CIF, CDF and CDIF price for goods and services. The system manages the production rate for the supplier by purchasing at optimal cost order quantities and shipping maximal discount rate. By coordinating the resources of multiple customers through the same suppliers and financial institution, the system will use economies of scale to lower transactional service charges and the suppliers' best price to the consumer. Furthermore, this invention also relates to the field of searching engines by cleaning, standardizing, organizing, transforming, analyzing and then evaluating the massive amount of data thus placing harmony, balance and proportion to the chaos and anarchy of the Internet, identifying keywords that use eigenvectors giving a value or a rank to each link of the world wide web. The system is comprised of computers configured, linked and otherwise arranged to form a Supercomputer subdivided into multiple hierarchical neural-like subcomponents, having neural elements residing at remote sites.
The present invention also relates generally to the field of Telecommunications, using parallel cluster computers to create a very fast and inexpensive Supercomputer that allows the integration of the Internet as a large and complex Telco Network. The application is meant to further clarify and elucidate the reader with the intellectual property contained in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,614,893, 6,842,511 and 7,058,601 by expanding from simple ILEC to national carriers, global IP Telephony and Wireless Telecommunications Real Time billing. The concept of vector CDR is further expanded to include roaming surcharges and multi-organization calls. The invention solves intrinsic drawbacks of clusters by dividing them into a grid of nodes that are able to move large amounts of data, and can perform decisions on their own absent of the centralized Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP).
The system is thus a parallel cluster Supercomputer with at least one teraflop of bandwidth calibrated to move organizationally the equivalent of one terabyte per minute (TB/min) of raw data. The Intelligent Components analyze, gather and distill the messages of the environment created by each telephone call, and then prime, rate and match/merge the plurality of CDR into a correlated billing entity that, in turn, is stored at the insertion rate of one million transactions per minute. The technology has evolved into a mission critical system that is commercially known as the Managerial Pyramid Switch® (hereinafter MPS®), that is designed to simulate and plot circuit by circuit all of the telecommunications networks of a PTT. The commercial version of the MPS® is designed to handle a small Telco such as ‘Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad’ (hereinafter ICE). ICE network consists of 1,160,000 fixed, 1,000,000 wireless and 100,000 IP Telephony subscribers, covering the entire 506 Area Code (or Costa Rica). A second ‘massive’ volume system utilizing a XLDB (Extremely Large Database) can handle a large Telco. For example: the Massive Mission Critical MPS® can cover France Telecom with 34,900,000 fixed; 48,100,000 wireless; 6,000,000 ADSL, 4,000,000 IP subscribers or the Internet with 1,000,000,000+ users.
Finally, the technology uses fuzzy math to measure the quality, performance and strength of the traffic traveling through the environment, so that human intelligence can perform strategic planning, and using Business Intelligence programs better understand the needs of the end users. By incorporating the MPS® into a UCommerce method and system, the supplier system will be able to identify inefficiencies, match/merge multiple quotes to take benefit of economies of scale, perform savings optimizing the traffic patterns of the movement of merchandise from Leg A (origin) to Leg B (destination) using X_FOB and Y_CDIF, and convert all of the suppliers, wholesalers, retailers, warehouses and links to possess geospatial, demographic and debit card functionalities to improve product, quality and service.
2. Description of the Prior Art
With the advent of the Internet and related technologies, electronic commerce and related online services have become ones of the fastest growing segments of the economy. Organizational data networks gather, validate, verify and exchange end users' information in an effort to understand, for example, the kinds of products, services and qualities consumers value most, and how and why they make such determinations.
With regard to the electronic trade (or E-Trade) industry, there have long been individual computers loaded with programs for performing online purchasing, inventory control and accounting functions to manage resources. Electronic trade systems rely on the processing power and data storage of a SMP or mainframe. A problem with these single computer applications has been that more processing power and data access capability was needed, as well as reduced bandwidth usage coupled with web and virtual world access.
Another related problem is that each transaction must be paid in full before goods and services are shipped, which particularly complicates matters for consumers who must obtain funds through financial institutions. Solutions to these problems are presented in the published doctoral dissertation of the present inventor, entitled “Designing Hot billing Systems for Large Volume and/or Complex Network”, submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at California Coast University in November of 1999, the entire content of which is incorporated herein for reference.
Accordingly, UCommerce is an integrated real time Financial Resource Management, Online Purchasing and Inventory Control system that overcomes the shortcomings, limitations and drawbacks of the existing prior art.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a computer network system operating in parallel and simulating a network of existing retailers, wholesalers and suppliers, wherein the system has the capability to produce, sell or transfer goods and/or services without taxing the capacity of the existing network.
It is another object of the present invention to provide such a computer network system configured to instantaneously generate, plot and update a lowest price and optimal shipping cost trajectory between two geographical locations for each user's request, immediately upon scanning the user's initial network message.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide such a computer network system which plots the optimal shipping trajectory, providing the lowest cost and delay time for a particular transaction. Where the purchase order contains pricing data that enables billing to commence, the moment of the financial resources are made available and updated or continued in real time as the transaction progresses.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide such a computer network that minimizes bandwidth usage by performing scheduled and synchronized supplier and wholesaler “available inventory” calculations and updates throughout the network. The computers are networked together to function as a Supercomputer, which can accurately project future resource requirement trends in order to update end user's software to avoid system congestion. Preferably, a Summit Tier and functions are provided to update all of the components by sending only summarized information packets to their organizational subordinates.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide such a network system that maximizes network-processing power by shunting calls from computers momentarily operating at or near capacity, and thus having smaller buffers to less-taxed computers having larger buffers. Preferably, this process of sharing available resources between members of the systems mimics lateral and vertical synergy in human organizations.
It is yet a further object of the present invention to provide such a network system having the flexibility to operate in conjunction with antiquated financial institutions and supplier technologies, so that existing equipment is not wasted and the cost of updating is minimized.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide such a network system, wherein the system performs network troubleshooting functions to minimize down time and platform failure by warning a repair crew, almost immediately of the nature and location of a problem. Preferably, in this manner, the system is maintained via a proactive and preventative maintenance program.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide such a system that enables customers and multiple suppliers to collectively and partially satisfy an entire purchase order.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide such a system, which is relatively redundant and inexpensive to assemble and operate.
It is still another object of the present invention to convert the prior art to the UCommerce architecture into a Managerial Pyramid Switch®.
It is still another object of the present invention to partition the main cluster or superset into sets, subsets and elements, that are placed in a distributed manner for better efficiency and effectiveness of handle tasks.
It is still another object of the present invention to add geospatial components to X_FOB and Y_CDIF methods and multi transport dimensioning to permit more sophisticated logistic planning of resources from origin to destination (or Leg A to Leg B).
It is still another object of the present invention to create a method, commercially known as XCommerce, that converts the ‘massive’ amounts of electronic information of the Internet by transforming the content into basic language business blocks and then stores its mathematical values into Environmental Bitmaps Data Structures, so that Inventory Control Systems can quantify, qualify and match/merge the best satisfying results of an end user KEYWORD request.
It is still another object of the present invention to create a method that identifies the best cost at the local, regional and global scope, commercially known as Z_PRICE, pronounced as ‘The Price’.
It is still another object of the present invention to be able to match/merge a plurality of quotes into a macro quote with several transport and time sensitive dimensions.
It is still another object of the present invention to give vector characteristics to the geospatial information into traffic patterns that permit the optimal distribution of goods and services.
It is still another object of the present invention to transform the Summit Tier or Managerial Pyramid Switch® into a global domain Superset cluster.
It is still another object of the present invention to transform the Middle Tier or Synergy Interface Switch® into a regional domain set cluster.
It is still another object of the present invention to transform the Lower Tier or Team Work Switch® into a local or LATA domain subset cluster.
It is still another object of the present invention to transform local warehousing means that can accommodate retailers, wholesalers and suppliers organizations, UCommerce, Free Trade Zone and customs warehouses.
It is still another object of the present invention to transform each node member of a search engine cluster of 64+ nodes into an element, that owns a discrete number of links and has the means to valorize each of them as they become apparent through means of a web crawler ability to filter, analyze and distill the environment.
It is still another object of the present invention to optimize transport dimensions using X_FOB and Y_CDIF to comply with Z_PRICE optimizations.
It is still another object of the present invention to optimize the search engines dimensions using W_RANK environmental bitmap data.
It is still another object of the present invention to integrate a database XLDB (or Extreme Large Database) with Business Intelligence capabilities that control, coordinate, partition, replicate and maintain the vector patterns information that is redundant and robust.
It is still another object of the present invention to convert all of the physical and electronic information into environmental bitmap multi dimensional and geospatial inventory.
It is still another object of the present invention to create the means to store a summary of the traffic of behavior of the end user as patterns of behavior that are used to give value to links.
It is still another object of the present invention to apply the process of LATIN or cleaning and standardizing the environmental spaghetti, and enabling a lingua franca interface to distribution and storages means of goods and services converting all of the data into a superset Y. Superset Y=(0, R, ˜R, S, ˜S, W, ˜SW, U, ˜VU) has several sets R=Retailers, S=Suppliers, W=Wholesalers, and U=UCommerce Warehouses. The tilde symbol or ˜ represents waste. Each set A has real data and ˜A duplicate or garbage data. In large networks, ˜ or garbage grows geometrically as a network grows in complexity. Once the system data integrity exceeds a critical mass, the information with the environment suffers from the ‘Spaghetti Phenomena’ and then becomes confounded or useless.
It is still another object of the present invention to apply the process of cleaning, mapping, organizing, standardizing and transforming the content of the electronic files of the Internet into unique elements belonging to the Superset (U). The Superset U=(0, I, ˜I, J, ˜J, K, ˜K, T, ˜T) and has the independent variables (I, J, K) that measures content value, and the dependent variable (T) consists of the time dimension.
It is still another object of the present invention to give Y_LATIN or transforming and organizing the spaghetti of global traffic and availability of merchandise that is delivered door to door. This is the process where the MPS® removes all of the anarchy, chaos, redundancy and saturation, and in turn, reduces ˜R, ˜S, ˜U, and ˜W to 0 as Information Entropy is achieved.
It is still another object of the present invention to associate, coordinate, control, optimize and synchronize a plurality of independent searches request without saturation, with Informational Entropy and minimal latency or system tax burden. ˜I, ˜J and ˜K are eliminated as the system creates Simple, Hybrid and Complex Search Structure Searches that quantify and qualify with certitude the value of the content of a link. ˜T is eliminated once the system is able to gather, distill and analyze real time events of the environment.
It is still another object of the present invention to create the Z_PRICE method that analyzes and evaluates the spaghetti of the logistical queue of traffic in order to identify the lowest cost and time delays associated with the transportation of goods and services door to door by using optimal X_FOB and Y_CDIF prices from the local, regional and global scope points of view.
It is still another object of the present invention to create the W_RANK method that analyzes and evaluates the Internet's environmental spaghetti to associate, coordinate, control, optimize, synchronize and then match/merge a plurality of independent searches into higher informational quality results.
It is still another object of the present invention to teach how to build a Simple Pyramid Search valorization method for search engine keywords.
It is still another object of the present invention to teach how to build a Hybrid Pyramid Search valorization method for search engine keywords.
It is still another object of the present invention to teach how to build a Hybrid Pyramid Search valorization method for search engine keywords. The top valued W_RANK bitmaps are used as display means to end users.
It is still another object of the present invention to incorporate the latest techniques of X_FOB, Y_CDIF and Z_PRICE methods to deliver products and services door to door at optimal time and cost.
It is still another object of the present invention to incorporate the latest techniques of W_PRICE methods to quickly deliver the highest quality of content to a browser search request.
It is still another object of the present invention to incorporate the latest techniques of W_PRICE methods to quickly deliver the highest quality of content to a browser search request.
It is still another object of the present invention to incorporate, validate, valorize, analyze, read and distill the content of a link to improve the W_RANK.